6 ~ Friday, January 17, 1986 - North Shore News

Hels our kids

ow can we protect our children? How can we protect them from people who go into a house in the middle of the night, take a child from his crib, beat the child and leave the child to die on his front lawn?

How can we proiect our children? How ‘can we protect thern from a trusted teacher who uses the childrer.:in his care (o satisfy an unhealthy, sexual longing? ‘

How can we protect our children when our own government has deemed the building of skytrains, coal projects, highways and a world’s fair more important than funding child abuse programs? . *

Where is. the answer? - “at lies partly in education. It lies ‘in - ‘teaching people ‘to recognize the signs of abuse and to act on » them. It lies in teaching children what not to put up with from adults. It fies in teaching

‘ authorities to believe a child who says he has been abused and to do their best to help heal ‘the child’s visible and hidden wounds.

It’s 2 problem that is not going to go away

no matter how we try to pretena it can’t happen in Canada, in British Columbia or on the North Shore. ! We must be careful without being para- noid. We must instill in our children a sense of healthy caution, teaching them to call for help when they’re scared. Especially really young children who have not yet learned that some people may want to. hurt them. But most importantly, we must teach ourselves to react to such pleas.

™ mall northern B.C. communities are exhaling steams of -horror over the ¥ prospect of having to watch television programs exclusively Canadian. The CBC announcement of plans to replace aif American television productions. with their Canadian counterparts is indeed frightening. It’s bad -enough knowing we have to come up with our own culture, imagine having to sit through the feeble fruits of that culture every night!.

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LETTER OF THE DAY

“i i

| KNEW IT WOULD BEA ~ MISTAKE 10 USE Whisky TO REVIVE OIL SOAKED

DUCK...

Abortions at Lions Gate cast ‘pall over community’

Dear Editor:

Your editorial ‘‘Who Decides?’* ignores a major issue of the abortion debate: the destruction, by choice, of human life in our com- munity hospital. To suggest the majority view must prevail begs the following questions: is there a majority view, who speaks for the majority and,. more impor- tantly, the relevance of that view to the abortion issue?

John Turner, no friend of pro-lifers, recently stated in

Parliament that the rights of ” Canadians cannot be deter-’

mined on the basis of public opinion polls or even by the will of the majority. The rights, he suggested, must be determined as a moral issue. So alsé with abortion. Why should the value ‘of human life be determined by the will of the majority? Are we not all then at risk? Why should an unborn child ac- quire value only if it is

wanted? Wanted by whom?.

Do unwanted children, once wanted unborn children, lose their value if they do not live up to their parents’ expecta- tions? Why not?

The majority of. Cana- dians, through their. elected members of | Parliameent, voted in 1969 ‘for a restric- tive law that prohibits abor- tion generally, The Car- ruthers-Whelton litigation

. would clarify the meaning of

that law for all. It is a legitimate legal challenge to our hospital’s liberal abor- tion policy. It matters not

é

whether the abortion law is viewed as good or bad. Obedience to the law is not a matter of choice; the law must be clarified; the rule of

law prevail.

It has been suggested that the abortion decision is to be made between a woman and her doctor? Why? The Ca- nadian Medical Association acknowledges the key issues related to abortion are not medical. Abortion is. no more a medical issue because doctors do it than capital punishment a matter of elec- trical engineering because an electric chair is used.

The medical profession has long. recognized the human fetus (Latin for un- born child) as a human be-

ing. Indeed the authors of .

Williams Obstetrics, 16th ed. 1980, found in ail hospital libraries and medical schools, acknowledge that with the increased knowl- edge of fetal development, function and environment, the fetus has acquired the status of a patient who should be given the same care by the ‘physician: that has Jong been given to the pregnant woman. Dr. lan Donald, formerly Regius Professor of Midwifery at Glasgow University and developer of the ultrasound

-technique, refers in his book

Practical Obstetric Pro- blems, 5th ed. 1979, to cur- rent abortion practice as “not medicine’’ but “sociological scavenging”’..

' Support for the back alley argument raised in your

editorial no longer exists with modern abortion methods. That

to avert danger to the health

-of women who chose to risk

the hazard of an_ illegal abortion — as if the volun-

tary assumption of that risk .

justified the public execution of unborn children ‘to enhance the ‘quality of life’’.

Between 1959 and 1969, when the law was codified to permit abortion if the con- tinuation of the pregnancy endangered a woman’s life or health, an average of 12.3 Canadian women died each year as a result of self-in- duced or criminal’ abortion (Badgley Report p.66). The medical staff annual reports of Lions report, as far.as I could determine, only 1 death due

to criminal abortion between _

1960 and 1980.

While unfortunate, con- trast these figures with the 600 abortions performed in Canada in 1969, the over 600 abortions performed at Lions Gate in 1983, and. the 66,319 performed in Canada in 1982.

‘fhere is no valid reason to believe a tightening of the law would lead to more il- legal abortions. A 1973 study by Drs. Hilgers and

Sheurin of the Mayo Clinic:

assembled 21. scientific reports. from 11 countries: Tiy reported the passage of permissive abortion laws that no effect-on the crimi- nal abortion rate in. eight

argument - é advocated legalized abortion’

‘Gate Hospital’

countries, while the rate had actually increased in three. Dr. Hilgers ‘also reported that more women were dying of abortion in New York Ci- ty than before the introduc- tion of abortion on demand in the United States, and most of the deaths were from legal, not illegal, abor- tions. Studies in Britain have established little or no decline in the number of backstreet abortions since a more liberal law was enacted

.there in 1967.

In summary, your editorial chooses to ignore the major issue of the abor- tion debate: the unique valine

of human life from concep-

tion until natural death. It also fails to appreciate the need to have our law clari- fied.

While “pro-choicers”” may deny, for . philosophical reasons, the destruction of an unborn child is murder in the legal sense, they know perfectly well it invoives the\ killing of human life. They approve of it anyway and insist taxpayers. pay for the destruction of human life in our hospital.

Don't be fooled - by rhetoric. There is . nothing good about the butchering of unborn human beings, The killing of approximately 11,000 unborn children by abortion at Lions Gate Hospital: since 1969 casts a pall over this community.

George Carruthers Barrister and Solicitor North Vancouver